Controls for Stealth RNAi™ siRNA and standard siRNA

Using the right controls in each and every RNAi experiment can speed up your research, streamline analysis, and give you confidence in your results. Life Technologies has a wide selection of controls for your RNAi experiments.

Highly efficient delivery of Stealth RNAi™ siRNA or standard siRNA is necessary for significant levels of knockdown. Optimizing transfection, controlling for experimental variability, and using a powerful transfection reagent all raise the likelihood of RNAi success. The use of positive and negative controls may also help in assessing your experiments.

Optimizing transfection conditions

Good results in any RNAi experiment depend upon high transfection efficiency. Before starting RNAi experiments in a new cell line, we recommend optimizing transfection conditions. Invitrogen has a number of free transfection protocols on our website, but each assay is different and you will probably need to adjust the protocol to your needs.

For measurable gene knockdown in a cell population, it is very important to have the highest transfection efficiency. Even small reductions in transfection efficiency can determine whether you identify functional differences in your experimental samples.

Controls for optimizing transfection conditions:

Fluorescently tagged oligonucleotide to determine that the RNAi duplex has entered the cell

Dead cell stain to monitor transfection toxicity

Nuclei stain to measure the percent of transfected and/or dead cells

Positive and negative Stealth RNAi™ siRNA or standard siRNA controls to measure the knockdown levels in each transfection condition.

See below for a table of Invitrogen kits containing these 4 controls.
Once you have optimized the transfection conditions, we also recommend using these four types of controls in every RNAi experiment to monitor experiment-to-experiment transfection variation. For more information on how on to use controls and plan RNAi experiments, please read Invitrogen’s Seven Steps Toward RNAi Success.

Table 1 - Controls for Stealth RNAi™ siRNA experiments

Table 1 lists all of the available Invitrogen Kits that contain controls for transfections using Stealth RNAi™ siRNA. Controls 1-4 refer to the controls outlined in the numbered bullets above and are recommended for use in every RNAi experiment.

Table 2 - Controls for standard siRNA Experiments

Table 2 contains all of the available Invitrogen Kits that contain controls for transfections using standard siRNA. Controls 1-4 refer to the controls outlined in the numbered bullets above and are recommended for use in every RNAi experiment.